Vast's Haven-1 VR Experience Puts You Inside The First Commercial Space Station
Vast's VR experience puts you inside Haven-1, set to be the first-ever private sector space station next year. It's available on Quest, Apple Vision Pro, and PC VR.
Vast's VR experience puts you inside Haven-1, set to be the first-ever private sector space station.
The 21st century has seen private companies like SpaceX expand access to space, driving down the cost and increasing the cadence. Next year, no earlier than May, a startup called Vast plans to leverage SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch a private space station it calls Haven-1, and a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to bring the first set of four passengers to it for up to 30 days.
Now, you can virtually visit Haven-1 via a Quest headset, Apple Vision Pro, or PC VR.
Vast was founded in 2021 by Jed McCaleb, the billionaire behind the defunct Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange and the Ripple cryptocurrency (XRP).
Haven-1 is a relatively small station, around the size of a single ISS module (the ISS has more than a dozen such modules), as you'll quickly discover in the VR experience. But Vast hopes to start building a much larger modular station in 2028, called Haven-2, which it plans to pitch to NASA as one of the replacements for the ISS. The ISS is set to be decommissioned after 2030, and NASA then plans to contract multiple commercial space stations, for which it would be only one of many customers.
The 10-minute Haven-1 VR experience starts with a very low resolution, but thankfully also very short, 360 video where Vast's lead astronaut Andrew Feustel welcomes you to the company's California facility.
The experience then transitions to a rendered view of a SpaceX Crew Dragon docking to Haven-1. The main experience then starts, putting you in a rendered version of Haven-1 as Feustel's voice guides you through an on-rails tour of the station, ending with looking out the domed window.
Vast Haven-1 VR is available on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest, Apple's App Store for Vision Pro, and Steam for PC VR.
Charles Singletary
If you're looking for a more free-roaming VR space station experience, you can check out the Mission: ISS, which puts you in the boots of a NASA astronaut on the much larger station. It's free too, and is available on Quest and the Meta PC VR store.
